[WikiEN-l] naming convention for birds and others

[Ray Saintonge]

JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:

> One other point with regard to the everlasting capitalisation debate 
> is that it  is usually argued that non-specialist encyclopedias use 
> lower case, and only specialist handooks like HBW, HANZAB and BWP use 
> capitals.
>
> If it is being seriously suggested that Wikien should be the same as a 
> paper encyclopedia (or on-line version thereof), can I suggest the 
> following to bring other aspects into line.
>
> 1) Standardise spelling and names as American English (this solves the 
> capitalisation problem too, since you lose the European and Australian 
> contributors who write 90% of the animal/bird articles at a stroke.
>
> 2) Get rid of articles you wouldn't find in a "proper" encyclopedia, 
> such as lists of people called Fred, album play lists, articles on 
> "fisting" , lists of famous Hungarians etc. (I'll help on this.)
>
> 3) If you do item 1, then you can also revert the many US-centric 
> articles, which just assume there are no other countries that matter, 
> back to their original unsullied versions.

This seems to be argument by trivialization.  I suppose that there are 
people from AOL who would like to see us standardized to American 
English, but I still prefer capitalization to capitalisation.  The 
capitalization of bird names has nothing to do with American vs. other 
English.  The American Ornithological Union appears to be the 
organization spearheading this move toward capitalization.  Some of the 
most ardent supporters of capitalized bird names here on Wikipedia are 
not Americans, so where does that put your argument?

Most other Americans in Wikipedia have been sensitive to anti-American 
attitudes throughout the world, and have bent over backwards to 
accomodate other ways of doing things, why should Jim seek to impose 
what represents the worst of American stereotypes.

Ec